When an autistic young person asks for “Social Skills Training”

What are we really being asked?

We recently delivered neurodiversity-affirming training with an NHS Speech and Language Therapy team. During conversation, a familiar question surfaced - one that we wanted to pause on:

“What do we do when an autistic young person asks for social skills training so they can make more friends?”

At first glance, it can feel like a straightforward request. It invites action. It pulls us towards teaching, equipping, offering strategies - and this can feel not only reasonable, but ethically aligned, because the young person themselves is asking for it.

But this is not a simple question.

It is a question shaped by experience - and it calls on us, as professionals, to examine the conditions that have led to it being asked in the first place.

Looking beneath the request

Often, a request like this does not emerge in isolation. It is shaped through repeated moments of not being understood, not being met, not feeling a genuine sense of belonging. It takes form within environments where difference is subtly - and at times explicitly - positioned as a problem to be fixed. Over time, these experiences can sediment into an internalised message: “If you were better at being social, people would like you more”.

So, when a young person asks for help to “fit in,” it invites a different kind of professional pause. Instead of asking "what do we teach?” we might first ask “What has been learned?” "What have they come to understand about communication and connection? "What messages have they absorbed from school, peers, professionals, and wider culture - about what is acceptable, likeable, or worthy of friendship?"

Many neurodivergent young people grow up in environments where their ways of communicating are framed as disordered, inappropriate, or in need of correction. Within this context, the desire to “fit in” can become less about connection, and more about survival. Over time, this can be internalised not simply as a wish to belong, but as a belief that they themselves need to be fixed in order to be worthy of that belonging.

But, communication is a two-way street

Communication is relational. It is not a skill contained within one person; it emerges between people. It is shaped by context, by shared understanding, and by the extent to which each person can access and interpret the other’s way of being in the world.

The Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012) helps us understand that misunderstandings between autistic and non-autistic people are not one-sided deficits, but mutual breakdowns in understanding. This has been increasingly supported by research. Studies exploring real-life interactions between autistic and non-autistic people have found that rapport, conversational flow, and mutual understanding are often significantly higher when autistic people interact with other autistic people - even when they are strangers - compared to interactions with non-autistic partners. Importantly, the same autistic people demonstrated greater communicative fluency and coherence in these matched interactions, suggesting that communication differences cannot be located solely within the individual, but arise within the interaction itself (Williams, Wharton & Jagoe, 2021).

Meaning-making, therefore, is not guaranteed. It depends on the extent to which both people can build shared context, align their attention, and adapt to one another. When people experience and interpret the world in fundamentally different ways, this co-construction becomes more effortful - not because one person lacks skill, but because understanding is always relational.

The hidden imbalance

Crucially, while communication is always relational, it does not take place on equal terms. In reality, it is most often neurodivergent people who carry a disproportionate share of the interactional labour - interpreting, adapting, and aligning themselves to ways of communicating that are positioned as the default. The neuromajority communication style tends to remain largely unquestioned, upheld as the implicit standard against which difference is measured. Within this context, many autistic and other neurodivergent people are doing significant - and often invisible - work. This may include:

• Closely studying social interactions
  

• Rehearsing responses
  

• Suppressing instinctive ways of communicating and moving
  

• Continuously monitoring themselves through masking.

These efforts are not simply about “learning skills,” but about navigating environments where safety, acceptance, and belonging can feel conditional. Pearson & Rose (2023) explain this is done to manage social risk, to project social acceptability and, ultimately, to seek safety in environments that do not readily accommodate them. Meanwhile, neurotypical privilege operates in ways that often go unexamined. Neuromajority peers, adults, and systems are rarely required to shift in return - even as neurodivergent young people are expected to continually adapt themselves. They are required to modify more of themselves, at greater emotional, cognitive, and physical cost, simply to access spaces, relationships, and opportunities that were not designed with them in mind.

This imbalance is not without consequence; emerging research has identified emotional burden as a significant contributor to mental health distress among autistic and ADHD young people within educational contexts (Lukito et al., 2025). Within this landscape, neurodivergent young people are, in effect, being asked to earn a place at tables that were never set with them in mind - a dynamic that risks compounding social and relational trauma, rather than alleviating it.

The risk of getting this wrong, even with good intentions, is significant

As Speech and Language Therapists, we hold real influence in how we respond to this request. We can affirm identity, agency, and self-understanding. Or (often unintentionally) we can reinforce the idea that belonging is conditional on change, and that becoming proficient in “soft skills” is the key to being accepted - justified as preparing a young person for the “real world.” But this requires scrutiny.

Whose world are we preparing them for, and at what cost?

Traditional approaches to “social skills training” are shaped by dominant cultural norms (often white, Western, middle-class expectations about communication, behaviour, and social interaction). These norms are rarely named, yet they are positioned as the standard against which all young people are measured. Within this, difference is not simply supported - it is corrected. And in doing so, we are participating in practices that can be oppressive. We are asking neurodivergent young people to move closer to normative ideals, rather than questioning those ideals themselves.

As Walker (2021) reminds us, drawing on Audre Lorde, the “master’s tools” - the very frameworks even when reframed with neurodiversity-affirming language, are still built on assumptions of deficit and pathology, and these cannot be used to create genuine liberation. When we work within these paradigms, even with good intentions, we risk reinforcing the very systems we are trying to soften. In this context, social skills training can become one of those tools: not because support is inherently harmful, but because the underlying assumptions position neurodivergent ways of being as needing correction.

Even when the request comes from a neurodivergent young person, moving straight to offering social skills training can narrow rather than expand their options. It can close down opportunities to explore the experiences, contexts, and unmet needs shaping that request. In doing so, we risk overlooking why difficulties arise, how environments contribute to them, and how conditions for neurodivergent thriving might instead be created.

Without this broader lens, we miss the opportunity to work within a more liberating framework - one that understands neurodivergent young people as neurominorities navigating systems not designed with them in mind, and that explores what authentic, sustainable ways of living within that reality might look like (McGreevy et al., 2024). This is not to suggest young people should be denied support in understanding social contexts and different styles of communication. However, without critical reflection, this work can drift towards compliance rather than connection.

The Hidden Cost of “Fitting in”

These approaches may increase a young person’s ability to perform socially.

But performance does not guarantee connection, safety, or belonging.

Recent research by Mulally et al. (2026), exploring autistic children’s experiences of social spaces beyond the home, found that many felt unsafe, misunderstood, ignored, or bullied. School peers were identified as the most common source of victimisation, alongside experiences of not being heard or understood by teachers. Many children described the cost of masking as exhaustion, loneliness, and the need to hide who they really are. In this context, what increases is not connection, but cognitive and emotional load, hypervigilance, and burnout.

These are predictable responses to environments that require ongoing adaptation without reciprocity. When acceptance is tied to the performance of “normative” social skills - particularly where others are not equally required to adapt, and where risks of harm remain unaddressed (Connolly et al., 2023) - both self-concept and belonging can become fragile, and wellbeing significantly compromised (Fielding et al., 2025).

So we have to ask: Does social skills training create the conditions for safety, acceptance, and belonging - or does it place the burden of achieving these on the young person alone, while environments remain unchanged?

Our role is not to make a young person “less autistic” but to support communication in ways that are meaningful, sustainable, and rooted in who they are. This requires a shift from teaching social skills, to understanding communication as relational, contextual, and shaped by power. It means recognising that communication differences are not deficits located within the young person, but emerge within the interaction between people, environments, and expectations. And it means holding in mind that we, as professionals, are part of that interaction.

What we might do in practice

When a young person asks for support with social interaction, we begin with curiosity rather than correction.

1. Listening differently

Not just “what do you want help with?” but “what has made this feel necessary? We explore their experiences of friendship, exclusion, misunderstanding, and effort.

2. Validating without reinforcing harm We take the request seriously. The desire for connection, belonging, and friendship is real and important. But we hold this without reinforcing the idea that they need to change who you they are to achieve this.

3. Expanding the frame

We gently explore who adapts in interactions, has anyone adapted their communication to connect with them, what environments feel easier or harder - and why? This shifts the focus from “fixing” the person to understanding the context.

4. Supporting agency-based strategies (if wanted) If a young person wants support navigating certain situations, we can explore this collaboratively. But the emphasis is on:

• choice

• consent

• flexibility

• self-understanding

• not compliance or performance
  

Questions that open rather than direct

Sometimes, the most important work happens in the questions we ask:

• What has led you to feel that your communication needs to change?

• Who suggested you come to see me?

• Is this something you want, or something you feel you should want?

• Has anyone ever changed their communication to interact better with you?

• Do you feel your communication is wrong? Where did that idea come from?

• Do you think that’s true?

These questions create space to explore identity, safety, and belonging - not just behaviour. If we merely stop at supporting the individual young person, we miss something essential. When only autistic or other neurodivergent young people are asked to adapt, we reinforce a narrow definition of what “good communication” looks like - one that centres neurotypical norms and devalues difference. Supporting communication, therefore, also means: working with schools and peers, shaping more flexible, responsive environments, and challenging assumptions about what interaction “should” look like.

Because inclusion cannot rest on the shoulders of the person being marginalised or excluded.

Returning to the original question...

So when a young person asks:

“Can you help me with social skills so I can make more friends?”

We might hear “I want connection", “I want to belong", “I’m trying to understand why this feels so hard.” Our role is not to translate that into: “Here is how to be more like everyone else”, but to ask:

"What would make connection possible without requiring you to become someone else?

Written by Elaine McGreevy and Emily Price

McGreevy, E., & Price, E. (2026). "When an autistic young person asks for “Social Skills Training”: What are we really being asked? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.divergentperspectives.co.uk/post/rethinking-social-skills-autism

References

• Connolly SE, Constable, HL, Mullally, SL, (2023) School distress and the school attendance crisis: a story dominated by neurodivergence and unmet need. Front Psychiatry, 14

• Fielding, C., Streete

  r, A., Riby, D. M., & Hanley, M. (2025). Neurodivergent Pupils’ Experiences of School Distress and Attendance Difficulties. Neurodiversity, 3.

• Lukito S, Chandler S, Kakoulidou M, Griffiths K, Wyatt A, Funnell E, Pavlopoulou G, Baker S, Stahl D, Sonuga-Barke E; RE‐STAR team. Emotional burden in school as a source of mental health problems associated with ADHD and/or autism: Development and validation of a new co-produced self-report measure. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2025 Oct;66(10):1577-1592. doi: 10.1111/jcpp.70003. Epub 2025 Jul 24. PMID: 40707015; PMCID: PMC12447693.

• McGreevy, E., Quinn, A., Law, R., Botha, M., Evans, M., Rose, K., Moyse, R., Boyens, T., Matejko, M., & Pavlopoulou, G. (2026). An Experience Sensitive Approach to Care With and for Autistic Children and Young People in Clinical Services. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 66(1), 107-133.

• Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883 887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008

• Mullally, S. L., Wood, A. E., Edwards, C. C., Connolly, S. E., Constable, H., Watson, S., Rodgers, J., Rose, K., & King, N. (2026). Growing-up autistic: Sharing autistic children’s experiences and insights. Autism, 0(0).

• Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.

• Williams GL, Wharton T and Jagoe C (2021) Mutual (Mis)understanding: Reframing Autistic Pragmatic “Impairments” Using Relevance Theory. Front. Psychol. 12:616664. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.616664